Fact · Voice and AI
Home Assistant recommends at least an Intel N100 or an equivalent processor for running OpenAI's Whisper locally, and says the Base model runs reasonably fast for English and Spanish.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“If you wish to use OpenAI’s Whisper, we recommend using at least an Intel N100 or equivalent processor. ... This model runs reasonably fast for languages that have large public datasets to train on, such as English and Spanish.”
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, Home Assistant project, Home Assistant, 2026, Can I run this voice assistant fully locally?.
Open the original- What it measures
- The same answer says the Whisper Base model is the one that runs reasonably fast for English and Spanish, and that languages with less training data need the Small or Large models.
- What it does not show
- A minimum recommendation from the vendor for its own setup. It is not a benchmark, and larger models need more power.